Fixing the College Football Playoff format: How adjusting ACC tiebreaker solves most of the issue

College Football Playoff Selection Sunday came with a lot of drama. Particularly with two teams associated with the ACC — Miami and Notre Dame. Miami is a member of the ACC, while Notre Dame now has a “damaged relationship” with the conference, according to AD Pete Bevacqua. Instead of both teams getting in, the Hurricanes got the final spot, while two G5 programs took automatic qualifier bids.

Many people have called for a change to the entire CFP system as a result. Josh Pate wants to pump the brakes just a tad, instead pointing to the ACC tiebreaker rules. If the ACC had a better way of determining who played in the conference title game, none of this would have come into play.

“Maybe we ought to fix conference tiebreakers before we burn the entire system down and start from scratch,” Pate said via Josh Pate’s College Football Show. “This is a widely held opinion that I’ve heard. I happen to agree with it. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the ACC was a disaster this year, on the field. Very few of their teams were good. But then off the field, administratively, they didn’t have their affairs in order and they didn’t have their tiebreaker system properly calculated. That’s how you end up with 7-5 Duke playing for a conference championship.”

Duke came out on top of a five-way tiebreaker, all teams going 6-2 in conference play. Virginia earned its spot by just losing once and would have been in the 12-team field with a win in Charlotte. Instead, Manny Diaz‘s group threw a whole wrench into the process — something Pate blames on the tiebreakers.

So, what’s the fix? Pate begins by saying head-to-head should trump all. From there, long-winded scenarios should not play out when multiple teams are involved. Pate’s suggestion is just going by the College Football Playoff rankings.

“The second tiebreaker, especially in conferences like the ACC, ought to be College Football Playoff ranking,” Pate said. “If we changed nothing other than that, this mess would have been alleviated. Because if we did that, Miami would have gone to Charlotte to play for an ACC Championship and they, almost certainly, would have won, and they would have been in the Playoff as one of the five highest-ranked conference champs.”

Taking away divisions and adding three teams to the conference made the process a lot more difficult for the ACC. Pate says changes could be coming this offseason, allowing us to avoid this kind of situation if one were to ever arise again.